First of all, I’m really proud of the ridiculous hacker stock photo I was able to find in Shutterstock’s archive. Isn’t it glorious?!

So, as some of you may know, I occasionally write things for the New York Times on the side like this and this and this. (More utterly shameless self-promotion: I have a story on ticket brokers on the front page of today’s edition, and an interview I did with Wendell Pierce about New Orleans just went online here.) ANYWAY, a few weeks ago my password to get into the online system to file expense reports — the same password I use for a few other things — just mysteriously stopped working. After putting it in a few times and failing to access the system, I finally just gave up and went through the steps to have a new one sent to me so I could get in and reset it and whatnot. Now I think I know why this may have happened.

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

So, to recap, after someone at the Times started digging around into Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s fortune, it appears as though everyone who works for the Times had their password stolen! Good to know! And 53 employees had their personal, outside of the office computers infiltrated. They also hit the Wall Street Journal.

Does getting a password hacked by Chinese hackers means I’ve made it big?!

On another completely unrelated note, this Lady Gaga GIF brought joy to my life today, so you’re welcome…